Use Vim like an IDE

From Vim Tips Wiki

I use Vim for all text editing, even software development. At one point I stopped using IDEs. One major reason is that Vim can do all the major things I need from IDEs (tabs, file trees, greping, syntax highlighting, indentation, completion, "quickfix"ing, etc).

:help netrw for information about the explorer distributed with Vim. It does not display files in a tree by default, but can by using the g:netrw_liststyle option. It also offers useful file-sorting options (by date, size, name).

Code navigation in vi offers much more than a standard IDE, because of the ability to execute the desired combination of commands. Generate an index much more rapidly than an IDE with a heavy GUI interface: